Most Uber, Ola cabs to have free Wi-Fi

Most Uber, Ola cabs to have free Wi-Fi

Taxi-hailing ventures are significantly expanding the number of cabs that offer free Wi-Fi, following the success of pilot projects.

Uber, the world's most valued startup, piloted the project in Mumbai a month ago. It's now expanding the services to five cities, including Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR and Hyderabad. Ola has started offering free Wi-Fi on Ola Prime and the soon-to-be-launched Ola Shuttle. Sources told TOI that Ola would add the facility to several thousand cabs over the next couple of months.

"The cab firms are looking at 80% of their fleet being fitted with Wi-Fi by the end of this year," a source close to the development informed TOI.
While Uber has an exclusive tie-up with Airtel to use its 4G networks, sources said Ola, too, is using the country's largest mobile player. The cab aggregators are footing the bill of the device as well as the data usage. They use a 4G dongle that generates a Wi-Fi hotspot in a 100-metre radius with a device-specific password. The device, which costs Rs 2,300, gives speeds between 10-15 mbps.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation, with numbers obtained from drivers, indicates that the usage per cab in a month has been around 10 GB.

For Uber, free Wi-Fi is being introduced at the national level for the first time in the world. India already has the second biggest operations for Uber, with the service available across 22 cities and 1.65 lakh drivers on its rolls.

"It is the principle behind Uber experience that the consumers can get more things done while in a cab, be it getting their work done before meetings for professionals or catching up with social media for students, leaving more time with family at home. Network in India can be a bit sloppy at times, and this gives reliable high-speed internet," says Karun Arya, Uber spokesperson for South Asia and India.

Shuttl, a point-to-point bus service, is also offering Wi-Fi to its consumers in 30 Tempo Travellers on two routes in Delhi/NCR on an experimental basis. The company, which started operations this April, runs more than 400 vehicles across 22 routes in the region. "Most of our consumers are daily office-goers. So it made sense to offer Wi-Fi," says Deepanshu Malviya, co-founder of Shuttl.

Photo credit: Indiatimes. Representative image.

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